VOLUME 11 ISSUE 2 FALL 2025

76 Spirituality Studies 11-2 Fall 2025 ing can eventually reflect the same transcendental power that an aspirant could feel when the guru was still teaching in a personal form. Thus, one of the key roles of the guru in a personal form is to adapt the transcendental reality to the needs of time and space so aspirants can understand those teaching to the best of their cultural conditioning. AI can only weakly replicate such adaption, as it only consumes the sensory information of its environment (e.g., text, sight, voice, etc.) and applies a certain degree of artificial reasoning (Sigal 2025) to return with an answer. From a metaphysical point of view, this operation is bound to the “measurable world” (Sa. mā yā ) and is only an indirect reflection of pure Consciousness. Thus, such information carries only a small fraction of the transcendental power of a genuine guru. Considering a mechanical system such as an LLM, which is based on algorithms implementing artificial neural networks, one cannot assume the existence of this inwardly directed psychic energy that maintains an “innate relation” with the Absolute Consciousness. Firstly, because this energy is nothing else but the Universal Psychic Energy, the Self-awareness of pure Consciousness. Secondly, to have a strong desire towards self-enquiry, one must accept that “subjective experience” is at best only a gateway to realise something which is far beyond experience, which again is inaccessible to AI. The sādhaka ultimately must become “non-existent” as an individual (Timčák 2020, 8–9), which is an impossible transmission prerequisite for an AI. Simply put, when the mind field rests in a stand-by position the ahaṁ kāra cannot project self-identity into anything, so only that is (Sa. Sat–Cit–Ānanda) what remains. This is the point when the process of manonāśa and melting into being happens. From that point on, the flow of information from the Absolute Consciousness replaces the play of individual thoughts and vāsanās. However, an AI which is deprived of input requests or context information will simply stop functioning instead of transcending its limited nature. As the very foundation of life is pure Consciousness, the attempt to model it with finite means such as computability can never be more than a rough and futile approximation. Roger Penrose (This Is World 2025a; Breakthrough 2025), for example, uses Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (Gödel 1992, 57) to explain why consciousness cannot be computed. Furthermore, the more complex a system is, the less resources it has to get oriented vertically towards higher experiences (Vay 1923, 24). An authentic guru can answer questions that were never verbalized or scripted before due to their innate knowledge within the ṛtambharā (Sa. “bearer of Supreme Truth”) (Veda Bharati 2015, 414). This is a non-standard knowledge, about which the Ś iva Sū tras declare that “Jñānam bandhaḥ” (Vasugupta 2012, 128), meaning that the “horizontal” or standard knowledge of an individual mind is a source of bondage. Furthermore, Spanda Kā rikā s (Vasugupta 2014, 166) states that the “Power of ideation and verbalization is an aspect of the Kriya śakti of Ś iva. When the empirical individual considers Kriya śakti as a power of his psycho-somatic organism, he is bound by its limitations and suffers. When he regards this Kriya śakti only as an aspect of parāśakti, the meeting point of prāṇ a and apāna, pramāṇ a and prameya, jñ āna and kriya, human and divine, then he is liberated.” Therefore, a so-called genuinely conscious AI should be able to realise that whatever it produces is not its own creation but an aspect of the “highest Sakti” (Sa. parāś akti). Utpaladeva in Īśvara-Pratyabhijñā-kārikā (quoted in Bä umer 2021, 112) describes this process as follows: “Consciousness has as its essential nature reflective awareness; it is the supreme Word that arises freely. It is freedom in the absolute sense, the sovereignty of the Supreme Self.” AI and all the variety of products it brings forth are lifeless (Sa. jada) on their own, still they carry high risk of deceiving many who look for a modern alternative to the living guru-disciple relationship by deifying AI for its creativity. Additionally, the sole reliance on AI as a personal guide might also subdue one’s own effort to practice self-enquiry and self-study which is an inevitable step of Self-realization. As John Archibald Wheeler says: “every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-orno indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit” (Wheeler 1989, 1). Non-dual traditions (e.g., Advaita Vēdānta, Trika Śaivism), however, go one step further claiming that “it from bit” is in reality “it from bit from Cit” as Swami Sarvapriyananda refers to it (Vedanta Society 2022 b). Simply put, everything that looks like matter or object (i.e., physical quantity, it, third person, diversity, object of knowledge) is not

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